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Featured in Development

Peter Alvaro talks about the reasons one should engage in language design and why many of us would (or should) do something so perverse as to design a language that no one will ever use. He shares some of the extreme and sometimes obnoxious opinions that guided his design process.

Featured in AI, ML & Data Engineering

Today on The InfoQ Podcast, Wes talks with Katharine Jarmul about privacy and fairness in machine learning algorithms. Jarul discusses what’s meant by Ethical Machine Learning and some things to consider when working towards achieving fairness. Jarmul is the co-founder at KIProtect a machine learning security and privacy firm based in Germany and is one of the three keynote speakers at QCon.ai.

Featured in Culture & Methods

Organizations struggle to scale their agility. While every organization is different, common patterns explain the major challenges that most organizations face: organizational design, trying to copy others, “one-size-fits-all” scaling, scaling in siloes, and neglecting engineering practices. This article explains why, what to do about it, and how the three leading scaling frameworks compare.

Azure Firewall became generally available in September last year during the Ignite event, after its preview earlier. With this firewall service, Microsoft provides customers with a way to centrally create, enforce, and log application and network connectivity policies across subscriptions and virtual networks. The firewall service supports both applications (such as wildcard domain names *.github.com), and network level filtering rules.

Azure Firewall users today can configure the service to alert and deny traffic to and from known malicious IP addresses and domains in near real-time. Moreover, the firewall service receives a feed of Microsoft’s threat intelligence, which includes these addresses and domains. Yair Tor, principal program manager, Azure Networking, explains in a blog post on the announcement:

Besides the threat intelligence based filtering, Microsoft also added support for service tags. With service tags customers can easily create network rules by simply using these tags in the network rules destination field. Furthermore, Microsoft will continue to add support for additional service tags over time.

An alternative for Azure Firewall is Barracuda which provides centralized management and highly secure, encrypted traffic to, from, and within Microsoft Azure deployments. Furthermore, customers can also obtain other third-party firewall services such as Sophos, Checkpoint, and WatchGuard, with rich feature sets at various prices. On a Reddit post about the new Azure Firewall capabilities, a participant commented on its price:

Currently, it's at an entry level of features, but at a premium service cost. Compare it to a service like Barracuda, and you can see why CSP's are not selling much in the way of Azure Firewall.

More details on Azure Firewall are available on the website and pricing details on the pricing page.